A tour of the world's most exclusive bars

Very few people have ever been inside the Bank of England's famed gold bullion vaults. For 80 years they have remained hidden deep beneath the streets of central London.

Last month, however, the bank broke tradition to allow not one, but two formal visits inside its high-security underground chambers. The first was an official royal engagement involving the Queen and Prince Philip. The second was by an Australian video journalist named Brady Haran who, as part of a bet, had been trying to wangle his way into the secret vaults for more than two years. In the past few weeks, the footage from his visit has been viewed by more than 2 million people online, most of whom were probably asking the same question: how does it feel to be surrounded by 4,600 tonnes of gold, collectively worth more than $300 billion?

Worth a mint ... the Queen inspects a gold vault during a visit to the Bank of England. Photo: Reuters

''It doesn't seem real,'' Haran told Fairfax Media. ''I held a bar the size of a brick and thought, 'This is worth more than my house.' It's impossible to comprehend what $300 billion could do - so to be surrounded by it is just crazy.''

Haran, from Adelaide, was working for the BBC when, five years ago, he began making science films in his spare time for the University of Nottingham. He later joined forces with a quirky chemistry professor named Martyn Poliakoff to shoot a series of short educational videos about each element on the periodic table. ''Since then, we've dissolved gold in acid, evaporated it and boiled it. But it was always our dream to get inside a real gold bullion vault,'' Haran said.

''I had an ongoing bet with the professor that we would never get in. I lost the bet.''

Beneath the Bank of England 400,000 gold bars are stacked. It is the second largest collection in the world, beaten only fractionally by the Federal Reserve vault in New York. Each bar is individually numbered and moulded to within a certain weight, ranging between

Advertisement

10.9 and 13.4 kilograms. Based on current prices, one is worth an average $420,000.

But interestingly, only 310 tonnes of the stockpile actually belongs to Britain. Most is owned by a host of other governments, including Australia, as well as by individuals.

The Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed to Fairfax Media a previously unknown fact - that 99.9 per cent of its entire gold reserves are held in the Bank of England's vault.

For the record, Australia presently owns 80 tonnes - approximately one-third of the total figure before 1997, when the Howard government sold 167 tonnes at an average $350 an ounce - less than a quarter of its present market value. Gold is now trading at $1604 an ounce.

The remaining 0.1 per cent of Australia's reserve, approximately 80 kilograms, is held at the Reserve Bank's head office in Martin Place, Sydney.

Haran said that on the day he arrived at the Bank of England, security personnel confirmed his video camera was only the second they could recall being cleared for use inside the vaults.

''It's breathtakingly beautiful down there,'' Haran said. ''There's a very controlled atmosphere and due to its thick walls and underground location, it's extremely quiet. The gold doesn't smell so the space is odourless. I imagined it would be a cold metallic prison-type place but it was actually quite a pleasant environment.''

He said one of the two gold bars he was allowed to use for filming had been mined and created in Australia. ''Gold is such a dense metal,'' he said. ''Your brain simply isn't prepared for something so small being so heavy.''

Professor Poliakoff described the vaults as enormously impressive but also ''a bit sad, rather like a mausoleum where the dead gold is sitting waiting for people to remember it.''

''One's first reaction is that it can't possibly be real because normally, you don't see such things. It looks like chocolates in the duty-free at the airport or something like that … it's quite extraordinary.''